1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic payment system for electronically settling a purchase price of a commodity or the like, and more particularly to an electronic payment system for performing electronic payment on a communication network.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the widespread use of the Internet and diversified ways of life, payment means are required which are usable by typical users irrespective of time or location. Studies of methods and systems have been underway to electronically pay a purchase price of a commodity or the like. Generally, an electronic payment system intends to realize one or both of “electronified value” and “an electronified means.”
The “electronified value” refers to adding value equivalent to money to electronic data such as electronic money and various kinds of prepaid cards, assuring it, and passing the data to perform payment. The “electronified means” refers to electronifying the right to acquire value or its procedure such as payment on credit, and for example, an SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) is widely known as a protocol to securely perform payment on credit on a network.
The realization of an electronic payment system facilitates consumer convenience, and offers great benefit to society such as an increase in consumption.
An electronic payment system is conventionally contemplated wherein a bank or a credit company cooperating with a communication service provider. The bank or the credit company installs a host computer for managing electronic payment to provide credit service. The communication service provider provides a communication infrastructure for connecting a store where consumers purchase commodities or the like with the host computer. A typical payment method before the system is realized with credit cards or IC cards held by consumers. Since the cards enabling purchase of commodities or the like make it unnecessary for the consumers to carry cash, the payment method is convenient, for example, when an expensive commodity is purchased.
The aforementioned prior arts, however, have the following problems.
While the conventional electronic payment system requires a bank or a credit company and a communication service provider to cooperate with each other to construct the system, the task is not easy. Since the construction of the system requires new introduction of a number of facilities, a considerably large anticipatory investment is needed.
In addition, since each credit company issues its own credit card for use in the conventional payment method and different ones of the cards can be supported by each store, a consumer often has a plurality of credit cards. A single IC card can provide a multi-function (for example, various prepaid card functions, cash card functions, and credit card functions). The IC cards, however, involve too high cost to be distributed to consumers, and thus the IC cards have not been commonplace yet. Furthermore, risk of theft or loss always exists as a problem common to both of the credit cards and IC cards.